On the night train from Delhi to Kolkata, trying to persuade myself to sleep, I started to count the Indian railway journeys I'd made. I reached 100 or so and then gave up. So many journeys, so many early-morning cigarettes smoked over tea drunk from those disposable clay vessels called kulhads - the platform littered with their smashed fragments - as I got down at a junction and waited for a change of locomotive: dawn the best time of day in India, Gold Flake the best cigarette, steam the best smell, an engine whistle the best noise, tea the best drink. Also remembered: so many conversations with my fellow travellers, salesmen who would tender cards with telegraphic addresses ("CHEMCO, KANPUR"), amateur and professional astrologers, army officers going home on leave, conversations that happened bunk-to-bunk after the conversationalists had unpacked their bed-rolls and spread out their sheets - one-night friendships, often surprisingly intimate ("Tell me, do you love your wife?"), their only souvenir a business card found years later, tucked in a notebook.
Thirty years ago, the people I met knew about trains, not because they were railway hobbyists, but because trains were the mainstay of Indian travel. Roads were a dangerous adventure, planes the reserve of the privileged. People knew the best trains and the worst, the quickest and the slowest, the routes, the numbers. "You need to ask for the Barkakana slip coach on the 9 Up, that way you don't have to change at Gomoh." "Never take the Upper India Express. Oof! It takes for ever." "Try the tea stall at Bandel Junction. Kapoor's. The tea is really very good."
They knew about outer signals, loop lines, up trains and down trains, how three beats on the station bell (which was often a length of old rail struck with a hammer) meant a train on the up line was approaching, while two beats indicated a down train going the other way. They knew the difference between different categories of train: mail, express, fast passenger and passenger. They bought copies of Newman's Indian Bradshaw - which in 1976, the year I first travelled on an Indian train, had reached its 110th anniversary of monthly publication - and ploughed through the tiny grey print of its timetables to determine how the family and its several trunks would reach, say, Patna from Pune. They were, in this aspect of their knowledge and behaviour, like Victorians. They would sometimes say Victorian things. "The railways have unified India." "The railways are a blessing from the British." In Bengal, which in 1977 elected a Marxist government, there was even a division among Marxists, between the fundamentalists who believed that Marx was right when he wrote that the coming of railways to India (they arrived in 1853) was an unqualified good, because they would create industry and therefore a working class and therefore a revolution, and neo-Marxists who took the view that they were a selfish, imperialist instrument which had brought a little prosperity to Indians only by accident. Marx, of course, had never been to India, knew about it only from what he read in the papers, but in Kolkata (Calcutta as it then was), to disagree with his prognosis was apostasy.
And now? Looking about my compartment, a two-berther called a coupe (once treasured by honeymoon couples), I could think only that railway travel had gone downhill. The Rajdhani from Delhi to Kolkata was once the finest train in India, air-conditioned in all of its three classes and by Indian standards speedy, 900 miles in 17 hours. I was travelling first-class AC, the apex of the class system, but the compartment carried no suggestion of luxury. I had memories of the Frontier Mail in 1977, when the old first AC compartments had polished veneer and yellow lamps: peering into one from a platform where dozens of people lay asleep on the ground, wrapped in cloth like corpses, was like a street-sweeper's glimpse through the doors of the Ritz. Now my compartment was done out in grey plastic and scuffed, grey-painted steel with a strip light on the ceiling. It was not so different from the life on the platform outside, though drawing wider lessons about Indian society from this diminished difference would be a mistake. India goes on being a place of social chasms. What my compartment demonstrated was how travelling across the country has changed.
India has neither deserted nor stopped caring about its railways. In a surging economy with a booming population, they matter more than ever. The figures for traffic and investment keep on going up: in the year spanning 2005 to 2006, they carried 5.725 billion passengers (compared with 3.613 billion in 1980-81) and 6.82 billion tonnes of freight (treble the total of 25 years ago). With 1.4 million employees, they remain India's largest single employer and probably the world's largest organisation under a single management. New expresses are perpetually introduced and funds are being raised jointly with a Japanese company to build freight-only lines between the Punjab and Kolkata and Delhi and Mumbai. And yet something has gone missing from their trains: the old timetable wallahs, the anglophone upper middle class, now aloft in cheap airline seats, as familiar with flight times and queues at security as their fathers and mothers once knew how to lick an errant locomotive smut from a child's eye. Now, few of my friends in India ever take a long-distance train, though that doesn't mean the trains are any emptier. In terms of social class, they have filled from the bottom. You might call it the trickle-up effect.
Tea came to the compartment as we left the outskirts of Delhi, served by men in the kind of uniform worn by workers in American fast-food outlets, striped shirts and baseball caps. That was another change. In Indian railway management, modernity now means the Harvard Business School rather than the mesmeric bureaucracy left by an imperial civil service; among the staff of the pantry car it means dressing as if you might be dishing out Kentucky Fried Chicken when in fact you are delivering a vacuum flask of hot water, a tea bag, some cashew nuts in a plastic bag, a hot pakhora, a bar of Cadbury's chocolate, and a sandwich and an Indian sweet - sandesh - in separate cardboard boxes. Twenty or 30 years ago the food came unpackaged on plates. Outside the carriage window, as dusk settled over the plains of Uttar Pradesh, I could see the difference that packaging had made. Fields of empty plastic water bottles and carrier bags caught the last of the sun. It used to be said that, such was the enterprise of the Indian poor, almost everything discarded was recyclable: human hair from barbers' shops, the nutritious water that had boiled rice, cardboard, newspapers. What these fields proved was that, in the end, all that even the poorest man could do with yet another plastic bottle was throw it away.
Night fell. An attendant brought a blanket, pillow and sheets. I ate a dinner that included tomato soup and aloo gobi. Uttar Pradesh rushed past in the dark, though perhaps less in the dark than it was 30 years ago. Villages had clumps of electric lights - and they were bigger villages; the population of Uttar Pradesh, like that of India, has doubled since first I saw it in the days of Mrs Gandhi's emergency rule - her flirtation with dictatorship - when population growth was held to be the biggest obstacle to prosperity and steam locomotives had family-planning slogans painted on their tenders. Few people talk about family planning now; the fact that India will overtake China by 2040 to become the most populous country in the world is quietly, perhaps even triumphantly, accepted. As for steam locomotives, they have almost entirely vanished: more than 8,000 in 1976 reduced to 44 now. I thought of them when we stopped at Kanpur and again at Allahabad: how, when I first came to these towns and many more like them, there would be a flat cloud of black smoke on their outskirts, marking locomotives simmering in their sheds. And now at the head of our train the electric engine hooted again and again, long blasts lasting nine or 10 seconds, as we overtook freight wagons clanging emptily.
I expected to wake in Bengal but we were running late and I awoke instead in the hills of Jharkand, where the smoke of cooking fires rose above the hutments and bullock carts piled with hay were already being led down tracks. "Bed tea" was brought, that enduring Indian tradition of tea and biscuits consumed in nightclothes, then the breakfast omelette came with two slices of hot toast wrapped in a paper napkin. I always loved this entry to Bengal. The dry hills give way to green paddy fields and palm trees and the surprising sight of old industrial chimneys - square, with ornamented tops, the kind you would have found in northern England - because it was here that India first mined coal and built its earliest steelworks. What I missed, oddly, was the piped music. In the 1980s, the Rajdhani's speaker system would play a medley of Bombay film hits in the evening, then in the morning switch to the sweeter and more melancholy songs of Bengal's greatest son, Rabindrinath Tagore, so that the music matched the geography. But now we travelled through the fields and steelworks without music, until the houses grew more dense and the pattern of railway tracks more complicated, and we arrived at our Kolkata terminus, Howrah, where barefoot porters swarmed aboard. We were only 90 minutes late.
Kolkata came and quickly went: a noisy space between trains. The next night I was aboard the 7 Down, the Puri Express, sharing a compartment with a plump man in a too-tight, olive-green suit, a man so sullen and unresponsive that I imagined he had no English until, once he was comfortably between his sheets, he spoke up to instruct me: "Now you may turn off the light and lock the door." He snored and, when not snoring, coughed. But the guard woke him in time for Bhubaneshwar and after that I was alone. At Khurda Road a boy selling coffee came down the train and when I gave him a good tip he raised the rupee note to his forehead and said, "Jai Jagannath" which means, "Hail, Lord of the Universe." Puri contains the biggest temple to Jagannath and pilgrims were the town's original industry, and now it was not so far away. I would hesitate to describe myself as a pilgrim: my journey was a pallid version of that made by many millions since at least the 12th century to Puri's rath yatra, when large images of the gods are hauled from the temple on wheeled platforms (hence the English word juggernaut) and where long ago the pilgrims, willingly or unwillingly, would sometimes sacrifice themselves beneath the wheels. No, I was not remotely a pilgrim in that sense - nor could I be, because the great temple at Puri bars all non-Hindus.
And yet coming to Puri was for me a kind of pilgrimage. In 1983, I came here to the Bengal and Nagpur Railway Hotel, familiarly known as the BNR, and liked it so much I returned a month later. I remembered the old Anglo-Indian menu - asparagus soup, steamed honey pudding - and how on the beach outside the hotel there were nulias, fishermen who wore conical hats with numbers on them and insisted on taking your hand as you went into the waves of the Bay of Bengal, to spare you the danger of drowning (for money, of course, hence the numbers: "Remember me, sir, I am 11 number"). It was an old tradition, from the British time, but then everything about the hotel came from an earlier epoch. I have kept my notebook. In 1983, the hotel had seven sweepers (all from the untouchable caste), five khalasis and peons to run errands, three cooks and four assistant cooks (all Christians), five bearers for room service and afternoon tea (Christian and Muslim), eight dining-hall bearers (Christian), three cleaners of utensils (Christian), two malis to tend the garden (Hindu), a Christian barman and a Christian marker in the billiard room, this working pyramid topped by a mainly Hindu layer of stenographers, electricians and assistant managers. There was a sign on a door: "Invalids and disfigured persons are not allowed into the general dining hall."
The hotel was famous throughout eastern India, perpetuating the name of a rather go-ahead railway company (the only one in India to own hotels) that had ceased to exist as a separate entity in about 1950. It was in a bedroom at the BNR that Satyajit Ray had written the script for one of his finest films, Charulata; Tito had stayed here and JK Galbraith; in the appreciation book a minister of railways had written, "Only after visiting this hotel I realised what the poet must have meant when he wrote: 'A...#8239;thing of beauty is joy for ever.' "
The surprise was not that the hotel was still there - I knew that from friends in Kolkata - but that it had become such a minor landmark. The Jagannath temple and the BNR: these two things had once summarised Puri, to the world beyond that was all it had been. Now along the beach stood hotel after hotel - the Sea View, the Sea Hawk, the Mayfair, the Gopinath, the Coconut Palms, on and on they went, all facing a new promenade with new Victorian lamp-posts, crowded by strolling Bengalis drinking Coke and stopping to look at the plastic models of Jagannath on the souvenir stalls. Forty years ago, oil lanterns lit the few bungalows on this spot; the BNR had the town's only generator. Now it was like Brighton. India's new middle class, created by the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, had arrived.
I went back to the BNR and took a room for the day: 800 rupees or £10, non-AC. Very few people were staying. The bar had closed, its shelves emptied of bottles, and no marker haunted the billiard room. In the dining hall, which no longer forbids the disfigured, I ate lunch alone - good plain Indian food; the steamed honey pudding and the chicken Marengo had gone from the menu. An old-fashioned silence hung about the corridors and their floors of polished concrete, broken by the occasional locomotive horn and a distant tinkle of rickshaw bells. I took tea on the veranda underneath some old stags' heads and inspected a dusty display cabinet ("Presented by Hon Mr Justice SK Mukherjee") that contained nothing much more than old knives and forks. In my room I picked up the telephone that lay on the bedside table next to the mosquito tablet, the candle and the box of matches - all emergencies catered for - and asked to be connected to a number in Kolkata. A buzz, a silence. "Subscriber trunk dialling not working, sir," the operator said, quietly triumphant.
So much of India was like this once, and the truth is I rather liked it. But soon the BNR will change - even as I write, the builders are scheduled to be at work. A private company has leased it from the railways and is converting it into a "heritage hotel", and so something profitable but self-conscious and parodic will emerge. As I was leaving, the shy manager asked if I would "write something" and I opened the appreciation book and wrote that I hoped his fine hotel wouldn't change too much. A minority view. Above me on the same page were lines and lines of virulent complaint. The waiters should speak more English, the TV screens should be bigger, the food should be better. One man wrote in capitals that he had seen the room and checked out in 15 minutes. A thing of beauty was no longer a joy for ever.
"What has changed Puri?" I asked the Kolkata surgeon sharing our compartment on the train back.
"The thing that changes everything," he said. "Money." Then he began to tell me what it had been like when he was a boy - the era of steam engines and oil lamps, when (we should also remember) untouchables could hope for no higher role than a sweeper and disfigured guests ate alone in their rooms.
·Ian Jack travelled with Cox & Kings (020-7873 5000; coxandkings.co.uk), which offers tailor-made travel in India, including train journeys between Delhi and Kolkata.
Five other railway journeys
Moscow to Vladivostock on the Trans-Siberian Railway
Book a cosy first-class two-berth or spalny wagon, gaze out of the window and lose yourself in the bleak grandeur of the Russian interior. After boarding at Moscow's Yaroslavl station, it's possible to chug your way through the world's longest railway route nonstop in seven days. But why would you want to do that when you can break your stately procession through 6,000 miles of Siberian pines and plains with stops at Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, Kazan, Novisibirsk, Lake Baikal and Ulan Ude?
imaginative-traveller.com
La Spezia to the Cinque Terre in Italy
A romantic little regional train that rackets around the Bay of Poets, stopping at each of the five picture-postcard fishing villages of the Cinque Terre. A 5km day pass lets you hop on and off at your leisure right up until midnight. Enjoy an espresso at the impossibly picturesque Vernazza, then swim off the rocks at Manarola. Plot the next leg of your journey lying on your back in the warm blue water, looking up at the cliffs of the Ligurian coastline.
cinqueterreonline.com
Copper Canyon Railway, Mexico
The Chihuahua al Pacifico railway is a no-frills kind of experience, and all the better for it. Find yourself a seat on the right side of the carriage and soak up the spectacular scenery as the train climbs the 8,000ft from Los Mochis on the Pacific coast through the Sierra Madre Mountains to the highland city of Chihuahua. Overnight at Divisadero, for handsome lodges right on the rim.
coppercanyon-mexico.com
The Ghan, Australia
When you pull out of Adelaide, suburbs give way to spinifex and eucalyptus as the Ghan trundles north, through the spectacular Flinders Ranges and the dusty outback town of Alice Springs before arriving at Darwin in the tropical Top End. Gold Kangaroo Service secures a double-sleeper cabin with private en suite, where you'll be rocked to sleep.
gsr.com.au
ntexplore.com.au
sa.gov.au
Cuzco to Lake Titicaca, Peru
Plush Pullman service to the mighty lake. For only £70 (first class, one way) you can hug the Huatanay river through Andean mountains in the lap of luxury. The price includes a three-course meal in the dining car, and post-lunch cocoa in the glass-walled Observation Bar Car, watching llamas and alpacas graze the Altiplano as the train climbs to 4,321 metres - then drops down on to grassy plains. At Titicaca, take a boat to the sacred Inca Island of the Sun.
perurail.com
inkaexpress.com
